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The Museum’s Collections document the fate of Holocaust victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others through artifacts, documents, photos, films, books, personal stories, and more. Search below to view digital records and find material that you can access at our library and at the Shapell Center.

Also in Oral history interviews of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's European Holocaust Survivors project

Alexander Bachnár (né Bachner), born on July 29, 1919 in Topoľčany, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), describes his father (Jakub Bachner), who was a painter and his mother (Františka Bachner), who was a homemaker; attending primary school in his hometown; studying at the Piarist Gymnasium in Nitra, Slovakia and transferring to high school in Prievidza, Slovakia; graduating in 1938 and attending the Pedagogical School in Bratislava, Slovakia on Lazaretská Street; being excluded from the school in March 1939 because of his Jewish heritage; being drafted into the Sixth Labor Battalion (VI Prapor) in February 1940; being assigned later to a labor camp for Jews in Nováky; doing manual work in the camp at first and later teaching children; the escape of a fellow prisoner (Weiser) from the camp, after which Bachnár served as director of the camp's primary school; the beginning of the Slovak National Uprising and the subsequent liquidation of the Nováky Labor Camp at the end of August 1944; joining the uprising; being a platoon commander of a Jewish partisan group and taking part in the fighting in central Slovakia; the end of WWII and working as the editor of the military newspaper Bojovník from 1945 until 1949; moving to the Pravda printing house in 1949 and working as an editor for two years; being released from Pravda in 1951 for political reasons; working for two years as a welder in the Juraj Dimitrov chemical plant in Bratislava; finding work in 1953 with the daily Práca as an editor and later working as a secretary and then as an editor of foreign affairs; being fired in 1969 from the editorial staff and subsequently being expelled from the Communist Party; being an editor at the Institute of Health Education between 1969 and 1976; retiring on June 30, 1976; and his marriage and three children.

Learn about over 1,000 camps and ghettos in Volume I and II of this encyclopedia, which are available as a free PDF download. This reference provides text, photographs, charts, maps, and extensive indexes.